This all started when the poorly designed USB charger port failed on our Evo 4G LTE. We had a lot of pictures and video from the past year, the phones are $0.10/dozen so the goal was to recover pictures, but the phone wasn't able to connect via USB. HTC in their infinite wisdom made it (almost) impossible to use the extra SD Card for default location to save pictures and video.

I found a reputable eBay repair shop and sent off the phone. They did a good job on the repair, but to my dismay, when I powered up the phone, it was reset to factory. An angry email later, they said the phone was in "recovery mode" and forced them to factory reset in order to test. I could point out that nothing in the auction mentioned they would need to factory reset the phone and that all of our data would be lost, but that doesn't matter at this point (other than for feedback purposes).

I downloaded Recuva but the phone does not show up as a drive letter and from what I'm reading, is set to MTP and is not able for security reasons to show up as a drive letter.

Is there any hope of recovering our pictures?

For reference, I'm a Linux System Engineer so if major hacking is involved, details or a link and I can probably make it happen. I'd love to recover these pictures, but the possibilities are looking slim.

 

I found the storage settings for camera - was that always there or did that happen in a recent update? I seem to remember when I got her the phone I tried to find how to make the SD Card the default storage for cameras and several forums indicated it was not possible (this was a while back) so I gave up and this is the unfortunate result.

Recuva does require UMS in order to work, but I don't have to use that - is there any software that will recover a formatted internal storage on a phone running JellyBean?

Is there any way I can downgrade to one that supports UMS? I couldn't find the details, but I assume the storage is soldered to the phone? I don't care about the phone itself at this point, I just want the pictures and video.

 

Hi Marc,

Sorry for the confusion.

The pictures and movies were on the internal phone storage. The folks that replaced the USB Charge port claimed the phone was in "recovery mode" so they had to do a hard reset. This returned the device to factory settings including removing the pictures.

I'd like to think the files are there and can be recovered with the right software, but with the Android software only supporting MTP and removing UMS, I'm running into a bit of a jam.

I'm attempting the recovery in a Windows 7 VM (VirtualBox), but I have a MacPro 10.8.2 with VMs for Windows 7 and CentOS/RedHat Linux. If it is possible to downgrade the phone to something that supports UMS, I can use software like Recuva to deep scan the phone storage for missing / deleted files.